Into Asia Minor beyond Taurus we have no reason to suppose that an
Assyrian monarch of the ninth century ever marched in person, though
several raiding columns visited Khanigalbat and Tabal, and tributary
acknowledgment of Assyrian dominance was made intermittently by the
princes of both those countries in the latter half of Shalmaneser's
reign. The farther and larger part of the western peninsula lay outside
the Great King's reach, and we know as little of it in the year 800 as,
perhaps, the Assyrians themselves knew. We do know, however, that it
contained a strong principality centrally situated in the southern part
of the basin of the Sangarius, which the Asiatic Greeks had begun to
know as Phrygian. This inland power loomed very large in their world--so
large, indeed, that it masked Assyria at this time, and passed in their
eyes for the richest on earth. On the sole ground of its importance in
early Greek legend, we are quite safe in dating not only its rise but
its attainment of a dominant position to a period well before 800 B.C.
But, in fact, there are other good grounds for believing that before the
ninth century closed this principality dominated a much wider area than
the later Phrygia, and that its western borders had been pushed outwards
very nearly to the Ionian coast. In the Iliad, for example, the
Phrygians are spoken of as immediate neighbours of the Trojans; and a
considerable body of primitive Hellenic legend is based on the early
presence of Phrygians not only in the Troad itself, but on the central
west coast about the Bay of Smyrna and in the Caystrian plain, from
which points of vantage they held direct relations with the immigrant
Greeks themselves. It seems, therefore, certain that at some time before
800 B.C. nearly all the western half of the peninsula owed allegiance
more or less complete to the power on the Sangarius, and that even the
Heraclid kings of Lydia were not independent of it.